A Canadian woman who fraudulently claimed her daughters were Inuit has been sentenced to three years in jail, in what is believed to be the first ever custodial sentence for a ‘pretendian’ … Nunavut justice Mia Manocchio said the case ‘must serve as a signal to any future Indigenous pretender that the false appropriation of Indigenous identity in a criminal context will draw a significant penalty’. (The Guardian, June 28 2024).

Concerns over false claims of Indigenous heritage – whether for professional, financial or other reasons – appear to be growing around the world. High-profile claims that have been challenged include people from music, politics and academia.

In Canada, as well as the numerous cases of these so-called pretendian individuals, questions about entire communities prompted Indigenous leaders to hold an Identity Fraud Summit in Winnipeg in May 2024. Featuring leaders from many of Canada’s long-established Indigenous groups, the event sought to highlight “the true national scale of the problem of collective Indigenous identity fraud”. The summit concluded that:

Canada’s willingness to deal with illegitimate claims of bodies such as Métis Nation of Ontario and NunatuKavut Community Council is an affront to the integrity of Indigenous governments and their fundamental right to define their own citizenship systems and rights-holders.

Over the past 30 years, I have spent time with, and written about, the Innu people of Labrador-Quebec. The Innu have lived and hunted in this peninsula of eastern Canada for thousands of years. Their heritage is a deep connection with and concern for the land, but they have never presumed to own it.

It is only within living memory that the Innu’s permanently mobile lifestyle ended, giving them the distinction of being the last nomadic people in North America to be forced to adopt a new, sedentary lifestyle in low-rise, low-quality settlements built by the Canadian government.

Even before my first visit in 1995, the Innu had been forced into a complex legal battle with the Canadian state to prove (in the foreign language of English) their right to ownership of lands their ancestors had travelled and camped in long before any of their legal challengers arrived in North America. But since then, this battle has got a lot more complicated, and heated.

Among those in the opposition camp is the NunatuKavut Community Council (NCC), a group the Innu had always regarded as white Canadians – settlers descended from mostly British migrants. Over the past two decades, the NCC has advanced a sophisticated and well-funded claim to belonging to an Indigenous group known as “Southern Inuit” – or more recently, simply “Inuit”.

The Innu have watched with bemusement as NCC members, including some prominent politicians, have laid claim to “our ancient land” (the meaning of NunatuKavut in the Inuit language). In 2019, the NCC signed a memorandum of understanding with the Canadian government, opening up the potential to claim rights to swathes of land that have been central to the Innu way of life for thousands of years. Today, this land is also of huge interest to mining and hydro-electric power companies, making rights to it potentially very valuable indeed.

As a sociologist, I find the whole process reminiscent of the Scottish land clearances of the 19th century, when evicted crofters had to appeal to magistrates who doubled as the very landlords who had evicted them. Except that here, new groups of crofters are appearing on the scene to confuse the picture and dispute the original claims.

‘Our origins are the origins of the animals’

Around 18,000 Innu people currently live in 11 government-built settlements across the two provinces of Quebec and Newfoundland & Labrador. But their spiritual home remains “nutshimit” – the boreal forests and tundra where the Innu’s ancestors, who archaeologists call Maritime Archaic Indians, lived as hunter-gatherers for up to 7,500 years.

Innu families still spend several months in this landscape every year – a partial continuation of a traditional way of life curtailed by their forced settlement in the 1960s at the hands of the Canadian government. I first joined them there in the spring of 1995 and it was a rather grand arrival: our helicopter touched down on one of the few patches of level ground at the Innu hunting camp at Utshisk-nipi, a lake set amid the spruce forests of the Labrador-Quebec interior.

Each spring, Innu families of all ages travel from their government-built coastal settlements where once they traded furs with the Hudson’s Bay Company, out into the forests, lakes and tundra – first on snowmobiles, then in motorised canoes as the ice and snow melts. On that first visit, I was camping with three hunting families and one non-Innu adviser they had nicknamed Footlong with characteristic Innu humour.

Most days in nutshimit involved strenuous physical activity demanding much stamina. Water is hauled in buckets from the river or lake; wood is continually chopped to keep stove fires burning inside the tents. Hunting and fishing often means travelling for several hours: Innu hunters are generalists with great knowledge of animal behaviour and biology, not to mention meteorology, ecology and a cosmology that ties humans to the natural world.

The Innu are deeply respectful of the environment in which they live. At Utshisk-nipi (named in the Algonkian language of Innu-aimun after one of the lake’s most abundant residents, the semiaquatic muskrat), I learned the Innu kill only what they need, share the carcasses of the caribou they hunt with other wildlife, and pay respect to their Caribou God through a mukshan feast – in which they prepare extracted marrow from the leg bones, mix it with the meat, and literally “eat all”.

The Innu believe there was a time when their ancestors spoke the same language as the caribou. According to land claims negotiator George Rich: “The origins of our people are the origins of the animals.” One popular Innu legend tells of a boy who married a caribou.

On that first visit, I also learned about “kushapatshikan” (the practice of the shaking tent) – which the Innu traditionally used to communicate with their animal spirits in times of hardship. In specially built tents within tents, a shaman or kamentuet would summon these spirits as winds would, according to those present, furiously bend the willow structures and the skins that covered them.

The oldest person in the camp, Dominic Pokue, told me he had witnessed the shaking tent six times; his wife, Philomena, had witnessed it twice. With the winds, Pokue said, would come spirits speaking a language only the shaman could understand – offering guidance on any troubles in the camp, how sickness could be addressed, and where the caribou were located.

‘They never say it’s because we’ve been colonised’

My time in nutshimit was a striking contrast to my visits to Sheshatshiu, one of the two Innu government-built settlements in Labrador. Sheshatshiu is a village of wooden single-storey houses arrayed on dirt tracks along Lake Melville, inland from the Atlantic coast. It sits across from the predominantly Euro-Canadian community of North West River, about 40 kilometres from the military and mining hub of Goose Bay.

In the mid-1990s, the main threat facing the Innu was perceived to come from the airbase there. Goose Bay airport was built in 1944, leased to the US in 1952 without consent from, or negotiation with, the Innu, and then to Nato countries in the 1980s.

For centuries, the land that was tarmacked over for the base’s runways had been favoured by Innu for berry picking. Not long into my time at Utshisk-nipi, British RAF planes soared over us at tree-top height. Their roars were followed by sonic booms, shattering the peace of the camp. We counted between ten and 20 jets a day. Low-level flying was offensive to Innu land-based culture, and as more Nato countries increased the number of sorties over their land in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the Innu’s protests on the runways attracted global attention.

Two of the Innu I camped with, Tanien (Daniel) Ashini and John Lennon-lookalike Penote (Ben) Michel, were central figures in those runway protests. Subsequently, they invited Canadian officials to come to Utshisk-nipi to discuss the low-level flying, its effects on the animals and Innu culture, and the Innu’s historical claims to the land. According to my companions, the officials initially agreed but then, over a crackly satellite phone, pulled out, apparently citing fears of cold weather and unfamiliar wild food. (The Innu families said they had been preparing to welcome their visitors by making new tents and bringing in store-bought food.)

The Nato base was viewed by many Canadians and local businesses as a catalyst for economic development and more jobs. When I first visited, the Innu said they were largely regarded with contempt by Goose Bay’s mainly white population – in part because of their opposition to the base, but also because of perceptions of some Innu drunkenness in the town.

Innu people I have spoken to don’t deny that alcohol and drug abuse is a problem within their communities, but complain this does not excuse the racist treatment their people continue to face – pointing most recently to a Goose Bay gathering to denounce the Innu in August 2024.

Thirty years ago, most of the Innu adults I met had been born in tents in nutshimit, and the youngest among them were the first generation to live in the settlements. They told me conditions there were harsh, with substandard housing, assimilationist schooling, and separation from their traditional culture and economy. Sexual and emotional abuse of Innu children was common in their schools, precipitating internal violence and multi-generational trauma. A major inquiry into the treatment of Innu children who were forcibly removed from their homes, families and communities is ongoing.

Early in my first visit to Utshisk-nipi, Michel commented on the many images of the Innu in the media as impoverished, dysfunctional, and living in shacks: “They never tell you why people get like that. They never say it’s because we have been colonised.”

Demands for extinguishment

Comprehensive Land Claims (CLCs) are the official process by which Aboriginal groups like the Innu, who have not signed any treaty with Canada, are offered terms by which they and the Canadian government can achieve “certainty” over their rights and lands. For the Innu, such a process is at odds with their heritage – which is to be respectful to the land, not own it; to move around their traditional homelands, not stay fixed in one place.

But facing increasing hardship and persecution, the Innu people who had been removed to the two Labrador settlements began their claims process in 1977. Nearly half a century later, they are still negotiating – with the parameters of what can be “claimed”, and even the political formation and funding of the Indigenous negotiating body, dictated by the state.

There is no treaty document showing the Innu ever relinquished the rights to their land to early European settlers. Yet Indigenous groups have no option to retain their Aboriginal title within the CLC process, which some experts argue is “rooted in the colonial policies and precepts of the 19th century”. The official “extinguishment” of any past land rights, as part of the current claims process, has led to conflicts within Indigenous communities as well as with other groups.

Previous land claims agreements in Canada, such as those with the Athapaskan-speaking Tlicho Dene in the north-west, required them to “cede, release and surrender” all land rights not set out in the agreement. Similarly, in 2005 the Innu’s coastal neighbours, the Labrador Inuit Association (now Nunatsiavut), had to “cede and release to Canada and the Province all the Aboriginal rights which Inuit ever had, now have, or may in future claim to have within Canada”.

A year later, the UN Human Rights Council singled out Canada’s demand for extinguishment in the claims process involving the Innu, ordering the state to re-examine it. However, Canada has not changed its CLC policy, confirming a pattern by which these latter-day treaties function as instruments of dispossession.

Despite this, the Innu Nation participates in CLC negotiations because its leaders see it as a way to avoid losing their land and culture. They hope to obtain some financial benefit to offset development on their lands, and that this will help sustain the poverty-stricken and troubled villages of Sheshatshiu and Natuashish.

Should agreement be reached, they are promised financial compensation, business opportunities, and a small measure of self-determination over their lands. But thereafter, these will unambiguously come under Canadian sovereignty – opening some areas up to extractive industries with less hindrance. Ironically, these benefits may be why other groups are now attempting to make similar land claims.

‘The Harlequin duck has more rights than me’

I visited Sheshatshiu in 2016 at the time of the slow spring thaw. It was slushy underfoot, and the detritus that had been covered with snow all winter was starting to reveal itself: discarded prams and broken electronic equipment, beer bottles and hard liquor containers, and shredded plastic bags sprouting like perennials along the trails between the houses and dirt roads.

Sheshatshiu didn’t look to have changed much since my first visit over 20 years earlier. More of the identical boxy wooden houses now contained multiple families. More grandmothers in their 40s and 50s seemed to be caring for several generations. The houses were overcrowded but convivial – inside, the rasping intonations of Innu-aimun were punctuated by bursts of laughter.

On the surface at least, the residents did not seem unhappy, even though there was no plan to build more houses for this expanding population. Our conversations often meandered between conditions in this settlement and the countryside beyond – the “happy place”, according to many.

In his living room, my friend Napes Ashini, cousin of Tanien and a keen hunter, admitted to finding the transition to settlement life difficult. Unemployed yet infinitely capable and well-read, Ashini told me: “I just smoke and watch TV.”

“There is no long-term employment plan for this community,” he continued. “The difficulty is that many people are not in a position to know what’s going on because of the very heavy drug and alcohol use” – an issue exacerbated by the quick influx of cash to those Innu who were working at the nearby Muskrat Falls hydroelectric complex.

Ashini was pessimistic about the land claim, suggesting there would only be quick gains for the Innu if it was ever settled – monetary compensation that would not begin to address the community’s many long-term problems.

Driving away from Sheshatshiu towards Goose Bay on the spruce-lined bumpy road, you see several handmade memorials to Innu people who have died, many of them well before their time. Sadly, the land claims negotiators I had met on my first visit, Ashini and Michel, had passed away by now, aged only 49 and 52 respectively. Both men had spent years shuttling across Canada with lawyers, sitting in sterile government meeting rooms to make this humiliating claim to their own land.

The CLC process is conducted in a foreign language (English) using highly technical legal jargon. Although Innu people can read these legal papers, they a far cry from the rich oral culture in which, even now, almost all Innu communications are conducted. Michel would often interpret the current political realities through Innu thought and culture. In one meeting in the mid-1990s about economic development, he told me:

It’s hard to compartmentalise my thinking and separate the big picture from the process … I am hurting from colonisation of the land by Canada. It is a feeling of being restricted. This society is making rules for us. The Harlequin duck has more rights than me – and I am not trying to put down the Harlequin duck.

When I lodged at Ashini’s house in Sheshatshiu, we would sometimes stay up talking for hours. One evening he tried to impress on me the contradictory situation of having to “spell out Innu cultural needs, only to be met with government formulas that the negotiations must work within”.

At the same time, mining companies were sending out prospectors to their lands without consent. Financial overtures were being made to leaders of different Innu groups, causing divisions. Like many others I know, both Ashini and Michel seemed haunted by a sense of inevitability – that the Canadian government and mining companies would do whatever they wanted on their lands, regardless of the official processes.

But both men died before the threat to the Innu way of life, and land, became more palpable in the form of the NCC. Back in the mid-1990s, they would surely not have dreamt that people who, despite some early intermarriage between English settler men and Inuit women in the late 18th century, were often indistinguishable from other settlers, would claim patrimony over part of the Innu lands of the Labrador-Quebec interior.

‘Our ancient land’

The NunatuKavut Community Council was born in 2010. Its founding was accompanied by the lengthy “Unveiling NunatuKavut” report, which argued for the existence of a distinct Indigenous “Southern Inuit” population. NunatuKavut was named as its territory but not demarcated in this document. The current website, however, shows defined NCC territories that encompass lands Innu have used for generations.

NCC members – now including politicians, academics and prominent Newfoundlanders – are constituted as heirs to a presence dating from “time immemorial” and meeting the criteria for a land claim. Their membership of 6,000 is about double the number of Innu in Labrador.

The NCC suggests that meetings between Inuit and representatives of the British Crown, which it refers to as the British-Inuit Treaty of 1764-65, is a “fundamental constitutional event” in the relationship between the Southern Inuit of Labrador and the government of Canada, conveying a host of rights on NCC members. The NCC argues:

From our Inuit perspective, the inherent right to utilise and harvest resources of the territory to create surpluses to engage in trade was fundamental to this Treaty relationship.

Responding to this claim at the Indigenous Identity Fraud Summit in May, Innu Nation Grand Chief Shimun Pokue said:

They claim that a British-Inuit Treaty exists from 1765, yet there is no proof that it was ever signed or if the people who would have signed it were those people represented by the Nunatsiavut government.

The NCC has repeatedly refuted any suggestion that its Indigenous claims are false. According to the NCC president, Todd Russell: “While there is a national conversation about individuals who fraudulently claim Indigenous identity, this is not a circumstance that applies to NunatuKavut Inuit. We are an Inuit collective who have a long and unbroken connection to the land, ice and waters of our territory. Our genealogy and ancestry are well documented.”

In September 2019, the NCC signed a “nation to nation” memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Canadian government, which recognised the group as an “Indigenous collective”. This opened up the opportunity for the NCC to explore a claim through the Comprehensive Land Claim system to Innu land inside Labrador, including Utshisk-nipi but also stretching down to the north shore of the St Lawrence river and taking in the Innu community of Pukuat-shipu in Quebec.

On hand for the signing was Lisa Dempster, who until July this year held a four-year tenure as Newfoundland and Labrador’s minister responsible for Indigenous affairs and reconciliation. She is also a member of the NCC. Although the MOU is not legally binding – and the Canadian government had reportedly been advised internally against signing it because of the unproven nature of the NCC’s rights – this was a significant strengthening of NCC as a potentially rights bearing group.

The MOU was followed by other acts of de facto recognition, such as a donation to the NCC of Can$10 million (£6.1 million) from Nalcor, a corporation operating the vast Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project on Mishta-shipu (Churchill river) – one of the most important rivers both in Innu history and contemporary usage. A 2022 MOU with the province of Newfoundland promised to include NCC-related content in its educational curricula.

Most recently, under Bill S-14 which had its first reading on October 19 2023, the NCC is to be given a part in the administration of the Akami-Uapishk-Mealy Mountains National Park reserve, which can be seen from Sheshatshiu.

While George Rich and other Innu land claims negotiators admit that NCC members have some Indigenous ancestry, they maintain that the historical cultural links they claim are threadbare, and largely based on crudely copying stories and donning supposedly Inuit attire:

I don’t believe NCC members ate the traditional Inuit diet and hardly ever lived like the true Inuit of northern Labrador. Fishing and hunting are survival, but they are for us attached to certain spiritual names of the animals … Everyone here has to survive through hunting and fishing, but that doesn’t make them Inuit.

‘The government is trying kill the Innu off’

It is not only the Innu Nation which maintains the NCC is not composed of Indigenous people. Nearly every Inuit political organisation has rejected the claims of NCC members to Inuit identity. This includes the powerful Inuit Circumpolar Conference and the Nunatsiavut government in Labrador, which has called the NCC “an act of cultural appropriation”. Next year’s Northern Lights Conference, showcasing Inuit arts and crafts, was reportedly cancelled because of concerns about NCC participation.

In 2023, Natan Obed, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, which represents 70,000 Inuit spread over communities across northern Canada, argued in an open letter that the NCC was attempting to advance its illegitimate claims to Inuit rights and status – a suggestion immediately rejected by NCC president Russell.

In late March 2024, a hearing on the Innu Nation’s judicial motion in federal court was heard, seeking to quash the MOU between Canada and the NCC on the basis that NCC are not “Aboriginal peoples of Canada”. Outside the court hearing, former grand chief Anastasia Qupee – translating for her aunt, the long-time Innu rights campaigner Elizabeth Penashue – summarised the dread pervading Innu life amid the current legal battles: “I feel like the government is trying to kill the Innu off.”

An NCC Press Conference was held a day after the court hearing. It began with a performance by two NCC members dressed in hooded and fringed red outfits carrying drums. NCC president Todd Russell appeared in an all-white loosely hooded outfit and went on to affirm that all his members are “Inuit citizens of NunatuKavut”, while attacking the “false, absurd and ludicrous rhetoric” of Innu Nation.

On June 12 2024, the Innu Nation’s contesting of Canada’s MOU with the NCC was declared unsuccessful. The court held that the MOU did not prejudice the rights of the Innu since it was only a means to explore a claim.

Afterwards, George Rich sent a simple email to me saying: “Looks like whites win another round.” The Innu Nation was required to pay the costs of the NCC, and clearly thinks the MOU opens the door to diminishing Innu rights.

‘Mining can present valuable opportunities’

A hint of where the narrative of Indigeneity might be heading was provided by NCC president Russell’s attendance at a mining and prospectors’ conference in Toronto in March 2024. A press release stressed that he and his organisation were “stewards of our natural and cultural resources”, adding:

Mining projects can present valuable opportunities for economic and social development and a way to advance reconciliation, but it must respect the longstanding relationship that we have with our land, ice and waters … It is critical that resource development projects first and foremost seek the free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous peoples.

Although NCC only has an MOU, it appears Russell is creating an expectation that companies seeking to extract minerals will consult his organisation in northern as well as southern Labrador. This includes a massive rare earth mining project and associated road building in northern Labrador at Strange Lake.

The NCC has repeatedly denied its territorial claims are motivated by money. Its submission about this proposed extractive project concluded:

As the traditional stewards and guardians of our territory, NunatuKavut Inuit are in the best position to provide relevant knowledge, make decisions, and monitor and enforce protections with respect to projects and policies affecting the natural resources on which we depend, and thus our rights in relation to those resources. NCC asserts its Inuit and Treaty rights to lands and resources within NunatuKavut, including the rights to hunt, trap, fish and gather.

Although there is little explanation of how NCC members are “traditional stewards and guardians” of the area, their expanded self-identification as Inuit rather than Southern Inuit makes this claim sound more legitimate, because NunatuKavut has been asserted to include northern Labrador.

In one of our regular group Zoom calls, land claim negotiator Prote Poker said: “We are very respectful. If they [the NCC] were Inuit, we would say so.” Damien Benuen, another Innu negotiator, drove home this point with emotion in his voice:

NCC says they were all over this land, but we have no record of their presence here. We named it. My grandparents have places in nutshimit named after them. We have a list of every place where our ancestors have been travelling since time immemorial.

‘Why do we think we are Indigenous?’

This spring and summer, like every year for thousands of years, the Innu of eastern Canada have been in nutshimit – hunting, fishing, making camps, telling stories, and observing respect and taboos against wastefulness and cruelty related to animals.

Today’s trips and activities demonstrate cultural continuity. The Innu people recognise that maintaining the nutshimit life is essential for their health and wellbeing, which has suffered since they were required by Canada to live in settlements – with periodic bouts of youth suicide and trauma associated with settlement.

Community government often sponsors extended experiences on the land for youth who are taught Innu practical skills, animal cosmology and rich oral history. Continuing many such expeditions since they were settled in Natuashish, at the end of August, 30 Innu women began a 90km expedition to Kamestastin Lake.

In all the many kitchen table conversations I’ve had in Sheshatshiu and Natuashish over the years, I’ve noticed that as soon as we spoke of nutshimit, faces brightened and the tone of our conversation changed. My hosts often became animated or reflective, and they would start telling me stories, legends, or dreams.

Prote Poker, who is a font of knowledge of Innu oral culture, once rhetorically asked me: “Why do we think we are Indigenous?” – before explaining:

We are Indigenous because of our stories such as the whiskey jack [Canada jay bird], who finds a boy on the ground and talks to the boy about how to find animals … That’s how we survive, by animals knowing who we are. And we have the story of the caribou who married one of our people. Caribou still see us as that person, because we are one of them. This is why caribou provide for us.

Despite the collective trauma and dramatic dietary shift from wild to junk foods that followed their abrupt transition from nomadic to village life, the Innu’s deep knowledge of the lands, waters and animals remains. So too the sensibilities and spirituality that makes them such successful occupants of one of the most demanding habitats on the planet.

“But my concern,” said Benuen, “is the future of our children and grandchildren because of what NCC is planning to do. Our grandchildren are struggling to speak our language – the government knows this, and is playing a waiting game.”